[GOAL] Re: Monographs

Fri Nov 29 20:29:14 GMT 2013

Larry Hurtado wrote:

> --The "gold" approach here in the UK = author-pay, whatever it may
> mean elsewhere.

This is not strictly true.  RCUK have given funds to pay APC charges, but they do not require that publication is in an APC-charging journal.  An author meets the RCUK conditions by either publishing in an open access journal - irrespective of its business model - or through green deposit.   

David

On 29 Nov 2013, at 17:06, l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk wrote:

> A few responses to Guedon's comments:
> --The "gold" approach here in the UK = author-pay, whatever it may
> mean elsewhere.
> --If many journals offer "free" services to authors, that's because
> they have an income-stream to pay the people who provide the services,
> whether by some form of subsidy (and I don't know of many in my field)
> or by subscription fees.  For these services to be provided will
> either require these income sources or the author-pay model.
> --We can extrapolate roughly what this would cost authors:  It would
> be at least multiple(s) of the single-article charge being levied
> already by, e.g., OUP and Brill for "gold" option article publication
> (in each case £2000 or more for articles of ca. 20 pp. printed).
> --I fail to see how any sort of mandate would be of any comfort and
> assistance to authors, whether first-time or established.  I repeat:
> Surely a fundamental rule should be that any convention should have
> the confidence and support of the constituency affected.  The
> alternative is tyranny.
> 
> Larry Hurtado
> 
> 
> Quoting Guédon Jean-Claude <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> on Fri,
> 29 Nov 2013 10:24:32 +0000:
> 
>> There a number of points to be made regarding Hurtado's message:
>> 
>> 1. The "horrid 'Gold'" must refer to the author-pay gold. This is
>> not the whole of gold, only a subset. Gold ciovers a wide variety of
>> financing schemes.
>> 
>> 2. The figures given for "horrid gold" - incidentally, I like this
>> term applied to author-pay business models - are real, but not
>> general. Thousands of journals offer gratis services to authors and
>> free use by readers because, simply, they are subsidized in one
>> fashion or another.
>> 
>> 3. Even if the cost of £2000+ (Sterling) were accepted for articles,
>> the cost of monographs could not be derived from a simplistic linear
>> extrapolation based on page numbers.
>> 
>> 4. Young scholars who may not enjoy Hurtado's stature in the world,
>> would be delighted to have their first work published, if only
>> electronically. Moreover, they would probably prefer open access to
>> ensure maximum visibility and use, provided the evaluation process
>> in force within their universities does not treat electronic
>> publishing as inferior.
>> 
>> 5. In many countries, e.g. in Canada, subsidies exist to support the
>> publishing of monographs. This precedent opens the door to possible
>> extensions to full OA-publishing support, for example for a young
>> scholar's first book.
>> 
>> Jean-Claude Guédon
>> ________________________________________
>> De : goal-bounces at eprints.org [goal-bounces at eprints.org] de la part
>> de l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk [l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk]
>> Envoyé : jeudi 28 novembre 2013 05:40
>> À : Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
>> Objet : [GOAL] Re: Monographs
>> 
>> Further to Steven's comment, as a scholar in the Humanities, in which
>> the book/monograph is still THE major medium for high-impact
>> research-publication, mandating a major change such as OA (even
>> "Green", to say nothing of the horrid "Gold"), would be opposed by at
>> least the overwhelming majority (and perhaps even unanimously) in the
>> disciplines concerned.  And the reasons aren't primarily author-income
>> that might accrue from traditional print-book publication.  For many
>> European-type small-print-run monographs, sold almost entirely to
>> libraries, often no royalty accrues to author. Even serious books
>> intended primarily for other scholars in the field and published by
>> university presses and/or reputable trade publishers, the royalties
>> will still be modest in comparison with, e.g., popular fiction works.
>> 
>> My best-selling book, sold ca. 5,000 hardback and has sold now over
>> another 3000 in paperback.  Several thousand in royalties, but,
>> seriously, my main aim in writing books has been to get them into the
>> hands of as many fellow scholars in my field as possible, and also
>> then into the hands of advanced students and other serious readers.
>> I've typically gone with a highly-respected and well-established
>> "trade" publisher, mainly because they combine excellent editing,
>> marketing, and a readiness to price the books affordably (e.g., a 700
>> page hardback at $55 USD, because they committed to a 5000 copy
>> initial print-run.)
>> 
>> For an equivalent service to be provided, someone has to pay.  "Gold"
>> access articles are costing now £2000+ (Sterling) each, with
>> page-lengths of ca. 20 print pages.  Imagine what an author would have
>> to pay for a 150-200 page monograph.  And don't tell me that
>> everything will be OK, because university libraries will hand over
>> their acquisitions budget for this.  It won't happen.  Moreover, what
>> about "independent" and retired scholars, who continue to produce
>> important works?
>> 
>> And the "Green" approach means no one pays, and so no service
>> (editing, and other production services, including promotion) will be
>> done free?  Think again.
>> 
>> But the fundamental thing is this:  Any "mandate" that does not have
>> the enthusiasm of the constituency is tyranny.  And neither "Green"
>> nor "Gold" access has any enthusiasm among Humanities scholars as may
>> be applied to books/monographs.
>> 
>> Larry Hurtado
>> 
>> Quoting Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> on Mon, 25 Nov 2013
>> 17:09:56 -0500:
>> 
>>> Sandy, I'm all for OA to monographs, of course.
>>> 
>>> It's *mandating* OA to monographs that I am very skeptical about, because
>>> there is unanimity among researchers about desiring -- even if not daring,
>>> except if mandated, to provide -- OA to peer-reviewed journal articles,
>>> whereas there is no such unanimity about monographs.
>>> 
>>> Not to mention that prestige publishers may not yet be ready to agree to it.
>>> 
>>> So mandate Green OA to articles first; that done, mandate (or try to
>>> mandate) whatever else you like. But not before, or instead.
>>> 
>>> Meanwhile, where the author and publisher are willing, there is absolute no
>>> obstacle to providing OA to monographs today, unmandated.
>>> 
>>> Stevan Harnad
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3 at psu.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Stevan continues to be hung up on the idea that some academic authors
>>>> still have visions of fame and fortune they'd like to achieve through
>>>> publishing books in the traditional manner, so he believes that the time
>>>> for OA in book publishing has not yet arrived. But perhaps a simple
>>>> terminological distinction may suffice to place this problem in proper
>>>> perspective.  Academic books may be divided into two types: monographs and
>>>> trade books. Monographs, by definition, are works of scholarship written
>>>> primarily to address other scholars and are therefore unlikely to attract
>>>> many, if any, readers beyond the walls of academe. Trade books encompass a
>>>> large category that includes, as one subset, nonfiction works written by
>>>> scholars but addressed not only to fellow scholars but also to members of
>>>> the general public.
>>>> 
>>>> There is an easy practical way to distinguish the two: commercial trade
>>>> publishers (as distinct from commercial scholarly publishers that do not
>>>> aim at a trade market) have certain requirements for potential sales that
>>>> guarantee that monographs will never be accepted for publication.  It is
>>>> true that the authors of monographs, published by university presses and
>>>> commercial scholarly publishers, are sometimes paid royalties. But these
>>>> amounts seldom accumulate to large sums (unless the monographs happen to
>>>> become widely adopted in classrooms as course assignments--a phenomenon
>>>> that happens less these days when coursepacks and e-reserves permit use of
>>>> excerpts for classroom assignments).  Thus not much is sacrificed,
>>>> financially speaking, by publishing these books OA. And, indeed, a scholar
>>>> may have more to gain, in terms of increased reputation from wider
>>>> circulation that may translate into tenure and promotion, which are vastly
>>>> more financially rewarding over the long term than royalties are ever
>>>> likely to be from monograph sales.
>>>> 
>>>> Also, of course, financial opportunities do not need to be sacrificed
>>>> completely by OA if the CC-BY-NC-ND license is used for monographs,
>>>> preserving some money-generating rights to authors even under OA.
>>>> 
>>>> It also needs to be said that even trade authors can benefit from OA, as
>>>> the successes of such authors as Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Jonathan
>>>> Zittrain, and others have demonstrated, with the free online versions of
>>>> their books serving to stimulate print sales.
>>>> 
>>>> Thus I believe Stevan is not being quite pragmatic enough in recognizing
>>>> that the time has arrived for OA monograph publishing also, not just OA
>>>> article publishing.
>>>> 
>>>> Sandy Thatcher
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> At 12:44 PM -0500 11/19/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Ann Okerson (as
>>>> interviewed<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html>by Richard Poynder) is committed to licensing. I am not sure
>>>> whether
>>>> the
>>>> commitment is ideological or pragmatic, but it's clearly a lifelong
>>>> ("asymptotic") commitment by now.
>>>> 
>>>> I was surprised to see the direction Ann ultimately took because -- as I
>>>> have admitted many times -- it was Ann who first opened my eyes to (what
>>>> eventually came to be called) "Open Access."
>>>> 
>>>> In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the thrall of the scholarly
>>>> and scientific potential of the revolutionarily new online medium
>>>> itself ("Scholarly
>>>> Skywriting"<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/>),
>>>> eager to get everything to be put online. It was Ann's work on the serials
>>>> crisis that made me realize that it was not enough just to get it all
>>>> online: it also had to be made accessible (online) to all of its potential
>>>> users, toll-free -- not just to those whose institutions could afford the
>>>> access-tolls (licenses).
>>>> 
>>>> And even that much I came to understand, sluggishly, only after I had
>>>> first realized that what set apart the writings in question was not that
>>>> they were (as I had first naively dubbed them)
>>>> "esoteric<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal>"
>>>> (i.e., they had few users) but that they were* peer-reviewed research
>>>> journal articles*, written by researchers solely for impact, not for
>>>> income <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1>.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> But I don't think the differences between Ann and me can be set down to
>>>> ideology vs. pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying to free the
>>>> growth of open access from the ideologues (publishing reformers, rights
>>>> reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer review reformers, freedom of
>>>> information reformers) who are slowing the progress of access to
>>>> peer-reviewed journal articles (from "now" to "better") by insisting only
>>>> and immediately on what they believe is the "best." Like Ann, I, too, am
>>>> all pragmatics (repository software, analyses of the OA impact advantage,
>>>> mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).
>>>> 
>>>> So Ann just seems to have a different sense of what can (hence should) be
>>>> done, now, to maximize access, and how (as well as how fast). And after her
>>>> initial, infectious inclination toward toll-free access (which I and others
>>>> caught from her) she has apparently concluded that what is needed is to
>>>> modify the terms of the tolls (i.e., licensing).
>>>> 
>>>> This is well-illustrated by Ann's view on SCOAP3: "All it takes is for
>>>> libraries to agree that what they've now paid as subscription fees for
>>>> those journals will be paid instead to CERN, who will in turn pay to the
>>>> publishers as subsidy for APCs."
>>>> 
>>>> I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely pragmatic -- indeed
>>>> logical -- grounds: the transition from annual institutional subscription
>>>> fees to annual consortial OA publication fees is an incoherent, unscalable,
>>>> unsustainable Escherian scheme that contains the seeds of its own
>>>> dissolution, rather than a pragmatic means of reaching a stable
>>>> "asymptote": Worldwide, across all disciplines, there are P institutions, Q
>>>> journals, and R authors, publishing S articles per year. The only relevant
>>>> item is the article. The annual consortial licensing model -- reminiscent
>>>> of the Big Deal -- is tantamount to a global oligopoly and does not scale
>>>> (beyond CERN!).
>>>> 
>>>> So if SCOAP3 is the pragmatic basis for Ann's "predict[ion that] we'll see
>>>> such journals evolve into something more like 'full traditional OA' before
>>>> too much longer" then one has some practical basis for scepticism -- a
>>>> scepticism Ann shares when it comes to "hybrid Gold" OA journals -- unless
>>>> of course such a transition to Fool's Gold is both mandated and funded by
>>>> governments, as the UK and Netherlands governments have lately
>>>> proposed<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1073-The-Journal-Publisher-Lobby-in-the-UK-Netherlands-Part-I.html>,
>>>> under the influence of their publishing lobbies! But the globalization of
>>>> such profligate folly seems unlikely on the most pragmatic grounds of all:
>>>> affordability. (The scope for remedying world hunger, disease or injustice
>>>> that way are marginally better -- and McDonalds would no doubt be
>>>> interested in such a yearly global consortial pre-payment
>>>> deal<https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=oI6LUpG8LPLCyAHT5IHQDg#q=McNopoly+harnad>for their Big
>>>> Macs
>>>> too?)
>>>> 
>>>> I also disagree (pragmatically) with Ann's apparent conflation of the
>>>> access problem for journal articles with the access problem for books.
>>>> (It's the inadequacy of the "esoteric" criterion again. Many book authors
>>>> -- hardly pragmatists -- still dream of sales & riches, and fear that free
>>>> online access would thwart these dreams, driving away the prestigious
>>>> publishers whose imprimaturs distinguish their work from vanity press.)
>>>> 
>>>> Pragmatically speaking, OA to articles has already proved slow enough in
>>>> coming, and has turned out to require mandates to induce and embolden
>>>> authors to make their articles OA. But for articles, at least, there is
>>>> author consensus that OA is desirable, hence there is the motivation to
>>>> comply with OA mandates from authors' institutions and funders. Books,
>>>> still a mixed bag, will have to wait. Meanwhile, no one is stopping those
>>>> book authors who want to make their books free online from picking
>>>> publishers who agree?>
>>>> 
>>>> And there are plenty of pragmatic reasons why the librarian-obsession --
>>>> perhaps not ideological, but something along the same lines -- with the
>>>> Version-of-Record is misplaced when it comes to access to journal articles:
>>>> The author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft means the difference
>>>> between night and day for would-be users whose institutions cannot afford
>>>> toll-access to the publisher's proprietary VoR.
>>>> 
>>>> And for the time being the toll-access VoR is safe [modulo the general
>>>> digital-preservation problem, which is not an OA problem], while
>>>> subscription licenses are being paid by those who can afford them. CHORUS
>>>> and SHARE have plenty of pragmatic advantages for publishers (and
>>>> ideological ones for librarians), but they are vastly outweighed by their
>>>> practical disadvantages for research and researchers -- of which the
>>>> biggest is that they leave access-provision in the hands of publishers (and
>>>> their licensing conditions).
>>>> 
>>>> About the Marie-Antoinette option for the developing world -- R4L -- the
>>>> less said, the better. The pragmatics really boil down to time: the access
>>>> needs of both the developing and the developed world are pressing. Partial
>>>> and makeshift solutions are better than nothing, now. But it's been "now"
>>>> for an awfully long time; and time is not an ideological but a pragmatic
>>>> matter; so is lost research usage and impact.
>>>> 
>>>> Ann says: "Here's the fondest hope of the pragmatic OA advocate: that we
>>>> settle on a series of business practices that truly make the greatest
>>>> possible collection of high-value material accessible to the broadest
>>>> possible audience at the lowest possible cost - not just lowest cost to end
>>>> users, but lowest cost to all of us."
>>>> 
>>>> Here's a slight variant, by another pragmatic OA advocate: "that we settle
>>>> on a series of research community policies that truly make the greatest
>>>> possible collection of peer-reviewed journal articles accessible online
>>>> free for all users, to the practical benefit of all of us."
>>>> 
>>>> The online medium has made this practically possible. The publishing
>>>> industry -- pragmatists rather than ideologists -- will adapt to this new
>>>> practical reality. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
>>>> 
>>>> Let me close by suggesting that perhaps something Richard Poynder wrote is
>>>> not quite correct either: He wrote "It was [the] affordability problem that
>>>> created the accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve."
>>>> 
>>>> No, it was the creation of the online medium that made OA not only
>>>> practically feasible (and optimal) for research and researchers, but
>>>> inevitable.
>>>> 
>>>> *Stevan Harnad*
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> 
>>>> Sanford G. Thatcher
>>>> 8201 Edgewater Drive
>>>> Frisco, TX  75034-5514
>>>> e-mail: sgt3 at psu.edu
>>>> Phone: (214) 705-1939
>>>> Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html
>>>> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sanford.thatcher
>>>> 
>>>> "If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)
>>>> 
>>>> "The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who
>>>> can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> GOAL mailing list
>>>> GOAL at eprints.org
>>>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> L. W. Hurtado, PhD, FRSE
>> Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology
>> Honorary Professorial Fellow
>> New College (School of Divinity)
>> University of Edinburgh
>> Mound Place
>> Edinburgh, UK. EH1 2LX
>> Office Phone:  (0)131 650 8920. FAX:  (0)131 650 7952
>> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/divinity/staff-profiles/hurtado
>> www.larryhurtado.wordpress.com
>> 
>> --
>> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
>> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> L. W. Hurtado, PhD, FRSE
> Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology
> Honorary Professorial Fellow
> New College (School of Divinity)
> University of Edinburgh
> Mound Place
> Edinburgh, UK. EH1 2LX
> Office Phone:  (0)131 650 8920. FAX:  (0)131 650 7952
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/divinity/staff-profiles/hurtado
> www.larryhurtado.wordpress.com
> 
> --
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131129/05d99e61/attachment-0001.html 